Low pitch is masculine and a grandmother?!

Firstly, I would like to ask you to listen to this short music snippet:



How would you describe this sound? Does it evoke any word associations? Is it, perhaps, high? Would you say that it sounds more blunt than sharp or vice versa?

Metaphors are no strangers to our everyday life. Even without realizing, we use metaphors on a daily basis: time is money, heart made of gold, someone being an early bird/night owl…

For the majority of us, another essential part of the human experience is hearing. Hearing is said to be the most abstract sense out of the human senses, so naturally, listening to music is quite a unique experience. That is why we tend to borrow words and metaphors that originate from other senses to talk about music.

If you are still reading this text, it is safe to assume that you are a proficient speaker of English. Then, you are probably familiar with high-low metaphor that is widely used in English, among other European languages, such as Russian and Dutch, to describe sounds of the opposite pitch. Interestingly, although this verticality metaphor seems to be the prevalent one, it is not universal across all 6,500+ languages that exist.

For instance, in Balinese (spoken in Bali), pitch is small or large. In Gbaya language family, that consists of dozen various languages from the western Central African Republic, pitches are arranged genealogically, so high pitch would be called a granddaughter and low pitch would be called a grandmother. Alternative metaphors include feminine – masculine, rough – smooth, thin – thick, among many others.

All of these diverse metaphorical pitch descriptions might sound foreign and a bit baffling. But what if I told you that you would probably apply these metaphors to high- and low-pitched sounds in the same way as a native speaker? That is, if presented with a low-pitched sound (imagine something like a heavy bass sound), you would be more likely to describe it as masculine, smooth and a grandmother than feminine, rough and a granddaughter.

Even if it sounds far-fetched at this point, I invite you to click through the dashboard and see how I investigated whether foreign metaphors are applied correctly to high- or low-pitched sounds by English speakers!

Sounds and Metaphors : Investigation through a Survey

With this research, I wanted to check whether the foreign metaphors are applied to high- and low-pitched sounds in the same way as they are in the language of origin. To test that, English-speaking participants were asked to listen to a high- or low-pitched instrumental music excerpts and judge whether the word (metaphor) presented on the screen afterwards is related or unrelated to the sound.

Please feel free to take a short demo version of the survey by scanning the QR code on the left or clicking the link!

In theory, participants are expected not only to correctly to answer whether the word matches the sound or not, but also answer faster when the word is indeed related to the heard sound.

This phenomenon, called the semantic priming effect, is seen in language experiments. For example, when one reads or hears the word dog, other words associated with dog, such as leash, cat, food, come to mind, not puzzle, case and gum.

The same principle can be applied to music: if you hear a piccolo (one the highest-pitched instruments) solo and the see word thin, you should be able to categorize the word as related to the sound without thinking too much about it. Conversely, if you see the word thick, it might require more time to process whether the word is really related or not.

Results: Accurate, but not Fast. What Does it Mean?

The results show that participants can accurately judge whether the metaphor is related or not to the audio. For example, high-pitched excerpts were said to be thin and sharp, but not thick and blunt, in the same way as the sounds would be described in the language of origin.

Unfortunately, subjects did not answer faster when the audio was indeed related to the word.

So participants agreed on what is the right word and what is the wrong word to describe a high/low-pitched sound showing that we might be born with all of these various pitch descriptions in our minds, but we just do not use all of them in our native languages. However, when needed, like in the case of completing an experiment, we can use those words as if they are present in our native language.